Gospel Reality

Abstract

It was September 1946. One year had elapsed since Isaac had come to terms with the awful truth that he would never again in his life set eyes on his wife or daughter. His consolation was to be reunited with his elder son, Daniel, in the autumn of 1944, and with his younger son, Jean-Claude, in the spring of 1945. Isaac’s letter to Daniel-Rops, published in the July 1946 issue of Europe, had become the talk of French Catholic circles. In his letter Isaac had demolished Daniel-Rops’ attempt to insinuate that the Holocaust might be understandable on the theological grounds of Matthew 27:25: “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’” In this reading, the catastrophe of European Jewry was not even a moment of theodicy. It was the fulfillment of invited eternal punishment. Isaac wrote of the controversy, “[Stanislas Fumet] informs me that the note in Europe had made a noise and that it was much talked about.” “P. de Menasce had read it, and even as far as the first paragraph is concerned, had found nothing inconsistent with Catholic faith…Fumet is convinced that they will not be able to suppress [the publication of] my book and that it will have reverberations.”